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Doing the best for an old item comes with time. I still cringe when i think what I did to the original papers in my first two Lines houses.....but IDHN wasn't available then, there were no magazines about houses, no advice from anywhere.

When did you start Rosemary? IDHN was around eons ago. I have a type-written, hand-duplicated copy of the very first one...Though I don't think Felicity Locke was warning people at that time not to strip off old paper :). I must take a look at it but the date must be early 70s perhaps?

The first copy of IDHN was issued in Winter 1967 and it was printed properly, not typewritten. I was given some by Felicity Locke when i bought a simply enormous house from her. Funnily enough, the typewritten copies came later! It was only Dolls' House News at the start.

I have been collecting since I was six years old and there have been times when there was an utter drought of items to buy. It was only in the late 70s/early 80s when it began to become a craze in the USA and items started getting made in China and taiwan and getting imported here.

Aha - it's so long ago now that I had forgotten that. I had a letter exchange with her in the early days. I suspect that is carefully filed away somewhere as well.

I remember being hugely excited to discover Michal Morse's little shop next to her husband's model railway shop in East Anglia somewhere. And then to meet Caroline Hamilton and Judith James running a stall at a tiny fair in Wimbledon, I think it was. That's where we bought our very first kit - a little Tudor Models shop which has now had more incarnations than I can remember. That must have been in the late 70s because in 1981 we went to Washington DC and were blown away by what was available over there. Cue purchase of Walmer Victorian house. It was packed in three flatpacks and to our horror only two arrived at Heathrow along with our suitcases. Fortunately the third one turned up on a later flight and the house is now proudly standing in Small Worlds, having had a complete makeover in 2013.

My early furniture was all made of balsa wood, patterns taken from one of the few books around, by Audrey Johnson.

The other thing I clearly remember having to do is collect supermarket and wine shop catalogues for tiny labels. Or taking a picture to a photocopy shop to have them reduce it many times on a reducing photo copier to get it small enough. Now it's just a couple of clicks of the mouse and hey presto! A perfect tiny label or photo.

The whole thing sounds absolutely terrifying to me - I'd have to stand over the restorer every step of the way if I was lucky enough to have a Victorian house in any condition and not able to tackle it myself!

I think I'm the one who needs someone standing over ME, whilst I work on my 1910 d/h property......

I bought it from Celia years ago now and, as well as its age, there is now the fact that I have discovered a minor family connection with it to make it special to me. So far, I've planned to remove some of the earlier 'restoration' that isn't quite wht it might be, but worried about my skill level and so not actually DONE anything, except furnish it.